Can Compaq change networking?

I s there power in standardization? This is the question posed by Compaq in an advertising spread run recently in such august publications as The Economist. Not wanting to keep us guessing, Compaq answers its own question with a resounding "Absolutely." That Compaq preaches the gospel of "industry-standard" far and wide is no surprise, given the success it brought the company's PC business. But how will it play in the network industry?

Along with Lucent and Nortel, Compaq is one of the recent heavyweights pouring some of its fortune-made-elsewhere into a bid to become a major player in the enterprise data networking space. Unlike the others, though, Compaq's application of its industry-standard approach means more than just support for the latest IEEE standard. In fact, Compaq's approach puts it on a collision course with the likes of Cisco, Bay, Ascend and 3Com. Change is inevitable. Either the network industry will change - or Compaq will.

Remote access is where Compaq has chosen to draw a line in the sand. Putting its beliefs into practice, Compaq's preferred solution for enterprise-scale remote access is a system built of a Compaq machine running Microsoft NT's Remote Access Services (RAS) code. In the company's view, combining industry-standard hardware and industry-standard software is the only way to go.

Every other leading vendor of remote access solutions has chosen the opposite approach. Their solutions consist of proprietary, purpose-built hardware running proprietary, purpose-built remote access software. No PC, no NT.

Ask those vendors about running, say, 100 simultaneous remote access users across a PC/NT platform and they'll likely scoff at the idea. What Compaq praises as industry-standard is, to them, "general-purpose" and not fit for demanding chores such as large-scale remote access. The question is which side is correct? Ironically, we've been here before. In the early '90s, network managers looking to implement internetworks were faced with the general-purpose vs. purpose-built quandary. At the same time as early remote bridge products were appearing from Cisco, Proteon and Wellfleet, other vendors, such as Microcom (now a part of Compaq), Olicom and IBM, offered competing products that were constructed out of industry-standard components - WAN boards and bridge software loaded into standard PCs.

When we ran extensive tests of these products in 1991, the PC-based products came out on top. Even just in terms of raw performance, the humble PC-based remote bridges consistently outscored name-brand proprietary boxes. "Industry-standard" products may have won that battle, but we all know that they lost the war. Ultimately, it was superior marketing that prevailed. Those PC-based internetworking products have become virtually extinct.

Perhaps the only company strong enough to promote PC-based internetworking and take on Cisco is Microsoft. About 18 months ago, it looked like Microsoft was on the verge of doing so. The much-heralded "Steelhead" code added mainstream routing to Windows NT Server. Suddenly, though, Microsoft became back-offish and downplayed the role of NT as an enterprise router thus avoiding its own head-on collision with Cisco. Perhaps Microsoft knows something that Compaq should know.

Tolly is president of The Tolly Group, a strategic consulting and independent testing firm in Manasquan, N.J. He can be reached at (732) 528-3300 or at ktolly@tolly.com or www.tolly.com.